Friday, April 07, 2017

Initiative for Open Citation Data

A new group backed by PLOS, Wikimedia Foundation, eLife and others has come together to establish a framework for sharing article & journal citation data in an open manner. In a short period of time this initiative appears to have gained significant support from publishers such as American Geophysical Union, Association for Computing
Machinery, BMJ, Cambridge University Press, Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory Press, EMBO Press, Royal Society of Chemistry, SAGE
Publishing, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley. Each of these publishers have agreed to supply citation metadata publically and this support will also significantly increase the amount of citation reference data available in Crossref.

The organization establishing this effort is named I4OC and they list (on their site) what key benefits should result for release of the citation databases:

The establishment of a global public web of linked
scholarly citation data to enhance the discoverability of published
content, both subscription access and open access. This will
particularly benefit individuals who are not members of academic
institutions with subscriptions to commercial citation databases.

The ability to build new services over the open
citation data, for the benefit of publishers, researchers, funding
agencies, academic institutions and the general public, as well as
enhancing existing services.

The creation of a public citation graph to explore
connections between knowledge fields, and to follow the evolution of
ideas and scholarly disciplines.

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Michael Cairns

I enjoy discussing the publishing industry and in particular the changes that impact the business. On PND, I don't write about everything, just the things that interest me.

My career spans a wide range of publishing and information products, services and B2B categories and my operating and consulting experience has largely been with brand-name companies such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Macmillan, Inc., Berlitz International, AARP, R.R. Bowker and Wolters Kluwer.

I have served as a board member of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and in addition to my responsibilities at R.R. Bowker, l also served as Chairman of the International ISBN Executive Committee.